I would like to welcome everyone to the new chafic.net, the virtual home of Chafic Chahine. More content will be added to this website within the next few weeks. Feel free to leave any comments, questions, opinions, and/or suggestions about my website’s new design, layout, and content.
This website has been optimized for use with Mozilla Firefox; see the Info page for more information. A link to the previous version of my website will be posted here soon.
Nice revamp Chafic - tell us about your strategy for updating, what considerations you used and where you benchmarked your tactics.
N
Dr. Hair, thanks for your comment :). As for my strategy when updating my website I wanted a more user friendly and a more search-engine (crawler) friendly website that would also allow me to update content easily without having to deal with the hassle of using a third-party application to create/update my site then having to use an FTP client to upload the changes.
There were many considerations that I used when thinking through the design of my website. The first of them being that my website was to be a self-branding website (something that I always wanted my website to be, but never thought of it that way until I took your Internet Marketing class). At the same time I wanted my website to help me further my career opportunities while maintaining a professional look and feel to it. This was possible with the previous version of my website, except that my blog wasn’t very well integrated with my website. This posed itself as a problem since my blog was what I was updating frequently in comparison to the rest of my website.
As for benchmarking my tactics, I used other self-branding websites as well as my old website. Some of the websites that I used for benchmarking included your website, David Penz’s website, Daniel Orth’s website, and my roommate’s website. Then I used some of the free tools available on the internet to compare the way my site performed in comparison to other self-branding websites out there. The websites for benchmarking that I used include:
The Schipul Keyword Density Analyzer
The Search Engine Spider Simulator
The Customer Focused Text Calculator
The W3 HTML Validator
EDIT: One benchmark that I won’t be able to immediately use is the opinion of the visitors of my website, but hopefully with time, this comments section will allow me to get some more insight into whether my website is serving the function its supposed to serve.
Looks like you did your homework :). I like the new design much better. The colors are much easier on the eyes.
Thanks for your comment Bob. When do you plan on getting your own self-branding website up? I’m sure that your band’s website provides some insight to who you are, but what about a professional/personal website?
It’s just a matter of me getting the plastic out of my wallet and going to register.com. I need the time to spent on it, and Dr. Tyler’s, Dr. Hair’s, and Professor Scrivens’s classes don’t give me that luxury right now:/ It will happen over the summer for sure.
I wouldn’t recommend using register.com, when you can use 1&1 and save $30 a year off of your domain name subscription.
Incase anyone tries to be wise, and find out if I use 1&1, you will find out that I don’t for chafic.net. The reason is that my hosting provider (PowWeb) offered me 2 free years of hosting and domain registration when I signed up for a 2-year package. I do use 1&1 though for my domain portfolio, which has been growing over the past few weeks :).
Thanks for the suggestion:)
You could use some links from your site chafic - other students for one - also - why not make your blog your first page? It’ll make the site look more current.
That was my original intention, but I was clueless on how to make certain blog posts sticky so that they would remain at the top of the page (this issue has been solved now). I guess I will move over my blog so that it is the first page.
As for the links, I will do that as soon as I have some free time on my hands to figure out where I would like to locate the list of links, I am considering the sidebar, but I do not want to make it too cluttered.
As usual, thanks for your recommendations.
A list of links has now been posted. The list can be found here.